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St Hugh’s Fellows team up to tackle tuberculosis

Professor Rachel Tanner, Tutorial Fellow in Biology, and Professor Thomas Cousins, Tutorial Fellow in Human Sciences, are working together as part of a new inter-disciplinary Oxford consortium to develop novel therapies for drug-resistant tuberculosis.

Led by Professor Tanner, the consortium has been awarded £5 million in funding from the Ineos Oxford Institute for antimicrobial research.

About a quarter of the global population is infected with the Mycobacterium tuberculosis bacterium, and TB still causes more deaths every year than any other infectious disease. Antimicrobial resistance (where bacteria evolve such that drugs no longer work) has made it harder, longer and more costly to treat TB. There is an urgent need for new treatment options, but efforts have been hampered by siloed working models.

The consortium unites researchers from across the University with expertise in medicinal chemistry, structural biology, microbiology, computational science, clinical medicine, public health and social science. It aims to establish a pipeline of TB drug development from target discovery right through to clinical trials.

Professor Tanner said, ‘A complex global health challenge like TB necessitates an integrated, collaborative approach and the college environment is really conducive to this sort of cross-departmental engagement. When I joined St Hugh’s, Professor Cousins and I quickly identified a common interest in TB research over college lunch. We work in very different but complementary fields and saw ways in which we could join forces and networks to find more effective solutions.’

Professor Cousins added, ‘The opportunity for social scientists to collaborate with laboratory scientists on drug development is hugely exciting – it promises to be a productive collaboration across several disciplines and departments. Working with partners in several countries with a TB burden means that on-the-ground experiences of patients and clinicians can directly inform critical stages of drug development.’

Further information on the project is available here: IOI awards £5m to Oxford consortium to develop new therapies for drug-resistant tuberculosis | University of Oxford